Week 2: Disability

Question 1

How does the medical model explain disability?

Models of Disability

Answer 1

The medical model explains disability as a disadvantage in terms of pathological states of the body and mind themselves.

Question 2

How does the social model explain disability?

Models of Disability

Answer 2

The social model explains the characteristic features of disability in terms of a relation between an individual and their social environment.

Question 3

What does the CDC say about disability?

Medical Model

Answer 3

A disability is a condition of the body or the mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the disability to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).

Question 4

What are the focuses of the medical model?

Medical Model

Answer 4

• Focuses on the notions of impairment and difficulty.
• Limitations result from bodily differences.
• Adopted unreflectively.
• Ignores or underestimates the contribution of social and other environmental factors to the limitations faced by people with disabilities.

Question 5

What does Scope say about the social model of disability?

Answer 5

According to Scope, the model says that people are disabled by barriers in society, not by their impairment or difference. Barriers can be physical, or can be caused by people’s attitudes to difference. The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people. Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people more independence, choice and control.

Question 6

What are the focuses of the social model?

Answer 6

• Focuses on the social factors creating impairment.
• Limitations result from lack of accessibility and social attitudes.
• Requires a change in paradigm.
• Identifies the disabled as an excluded minority.

Question 7

How, according to Barnes, is disability a difference-maker?

Answer 7

According to Barnes, disability is a difference maker but not a negative difference-maker. We don’t think of other minority groups as sub-optimal, so why should it be different for disability?

Question 8

In what steps is disability usually seen as negative difference-maker, and what does Barnes say about this?

Answer 8

1. Having a disability is the kind of thing that makes life harder.
2. Because 1, disability has a negative impact on the quality of life.
3. Because 2, disability is a negative difference maker.

Barnes rejects the leap from step 2 to 3 because this argument fails to differentiate between local quality of life and overall quality of life.

Question 9

How does local and overall quality of life relate to disability?

Answer 9

Local quality of life: Disability can affect one’s ability to do a specific thing.
Overall quality of life: Disability can affect one’s life as a whole.

Question 10

How does local and overall quality of life relate to disability being a difference-maker?

Answer 10

Referring to local quality, it isn’t enough to establish it as a negative difference-maker. Only a considerable disruption of overall quality of life would result in a feature being a negative difference maker.
If we refer to overall quality, it is simply false (i.e. not the case for many disabled people).

Question 11

What is Barnes’ analogy with non-heterosexuality?

Answer 11

“If you are gay you face certain limitations and a world of social stigma and discrimination. It is fair to say, I think, that life is harder for gay people. But we’d be very reluctant to say that, in general, gay people have a lower quality of life than straight people.”

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Question 12

How does Barnes argue for disability being a postitive difference-maker?

Answer 12

A feature (or difference) that makes one’s life harder in one sense (i.e. affects one’s local quality of life negatively) can make one’s life better as a whole (i.e. affects one’s overall quality of life positively).

Question 13

What is Barnes’ analogy with non-heterosexuality and positive difference-making?

Answer 13

“How gayness affects a person’s overall quality of life will depend on its interaction with countless other features and circumstances. But because it can be for some a positive, for others a negative, and for yet others probably not much of either, it is precisely the sort of feature I want to characterize as neutral or difference-making feature. Being gay makes a person different, but not different in any way that somehow determines whether that person is better or worse off. And this is the case despite the fact the being gay will make a person’s life harder.”

Get the overall idea, not the exact wording.

Question 14

Define bias.

Answer 14

Bias is a favourable or unfavourable attitude or belief towards a group of people that are activated automatically.

Question 15

Define explicit bias

Answer 15

Explicit bias is having an explicit belief, clearly formed in your thoughts, that e.g. racialized people are less academically gifted; or feeling disgusted against non-heterosexual couples.

Question 16

Define implicit bias.

Answer 16

Implicit bias is a negative belief or attitude you don’t know you have, but affects your beliefs, attitudes and interactions with members of a specific group.

Question 17

What are the effects of implicit bias?

Answer 17

• Damages to interactions (e.g. microaggressions: where are you actually from?)
• Harms self-perception (I dont have anything interesting to say)
• Societal imbalance (Are white men really better at doing the best paid jobs?)
• Product & service design (Designs that reflect these societal imbalances)

Question 18

What do biases influence?

Answer 18

Biases influence actions (how we choose to behave towards certain people), attitudes (how we feel or what we believe about certain people, which may translate into our choices).

Question 19

What are moral emotions?

Answer 19

Emotional phenomena that are morally relevant.
* Virtue vs vice.
* Being a good person entails having the right attitudes.

Question 20

What are the different views on pity, and what do disability activists think about it?

Answer 20

Different views:
* Pity is virtuous because it allows us to feel what others feel.
* Pity is worse than compassion.
* Pity can be good but can also be harmful.

Disability activists: pity is harmful.

Question 21

How does Stramondo argue that pity is harmful?

Answer 21

Stramondo argues that pity is harmful because it doesn’t recognize the social nature of the harm on the disabled. He said, “it treats their suffering as if thinks could not be otherwise and their suffering is natural and inevitable.”

Question 22

What does Stramondo say about powerbalance and pity?

Answer 22

Pity is a privilege by the powerful, enabled by the social structures that disadvantage the people who are to be pitied. This power balance directly benefits the privileged. Pity hides oppression (and is built on oppression).

Question 23

How does Stramondo argue that ableism is different from racism?

Answer 23

Stramondo argues that ableism is different from racism because:
* The people who are racist are often different from the people who pity others for their situation of racial oppression.
* The people who are ableist are often the same as the people who pity others for their disability.
* Disabled people who are happy are often thought to be mistaken about their own situation.